<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>and i would give up all my holy oaths by SilverCeleb</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27942806">and i would give up all my holy oaths</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverCeleb/pseuds/SilverCeleb'>SilverCeleb</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Booker dies plenty but he keeps coming back so yeah idk how to tag, Booker | Sebastien le Livre-centric, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Historical Inaccuracy, Multi, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Unreliable Narrator, War, but there is hope, for further content warnings see the notes, so many wars actually, things are bittersweet and also really horrible, warnings for the usual booker shit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 22:53:47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,655</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27942806</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverCeleb/pseuds/SilverCeleb</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>He still stops Quynh, because it is the right thing to do. It is a good thing to do.</i> </p><p>  <i>Bad persons can still sometimes do good things, or so he has to believe, or he has to turn back and never be better again, to abandon all but isolation and hurting others.</i></p><p> </p><p>Basically a self indulgent character study of Booker. Anyways canon is my bitch and all the plot holes in this fic are the clown bicycle I ride, meanwhile the timeline is so nonexistent that it might just as well take the form of making my parents proud.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Andy | Andromache &amp; Booker | Sebastien le Livre &amp; Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani &amp; Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Minor or Background Relationship(s), implied Booker |Sebastien le Livre/Andy |Andromache of Scythia, mentioned Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>63</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>and i would give up all my holy oaths</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>See the notes at the end for further content warnings.</p><p> </p><p>I needed to get this out of my brain, so here it is. In parts possibly incomplete and fraying, yet that is also one aspect of what I wanted to express with this text. I promised myself this would be a fast one, done in a night or two but ah, uh. Yeah.</p><p>Booker is a character that is both complex and very simple. On one hand there is a tangle of things, Booker things, but on the other hand it is a very easy to understand tangle. Fandom tends to draw in the kind of ppl who have personal experience with mental issues so, yeah, his assumed depression and suicidal tendencies get a lot of understanding. I see that and I kind of vibe it but. I don’t know. There is something in me that opposes it all. I guess that is one of the reasons he works so well to me as a character.</p><p>This fic is not a story about Booker redeeming himself, or recovering from his mental illness. The fandom has already given me plenty of those by authors more skilled than I am, and I am both left in awe and deeply thankful for those. Instead, this fic is a story about making mistakes and then living with them. It is all about letting your mistakes define you as a bad person, it is all about not believing you are one of the good guys and letting that blind you.</p><p>It is also about choosing to do the right thing despite self hatred and guilt. Here we look at the world and his actions through Booker’s eyes. He is of course an unreliable narrator. I will not point out what are the ways he is mistaken, but I hope you can see it and let him walk down that road with you.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>
  <span>i</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The first thing he learns is that the world is more than he had ever thought was possible.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Oh, he does not learn it then, but it is the first thing, if you count the lessons in the order they happen, disregarding any learning done later.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>When they find him, he has lost his composure too many times to count. It does not go smoothly afterwards, of course, but it gets less tangy. The taste of blood, the taste of alcohol, the sting of tears. It is mundane almost, but there is a place for him now. He learns new streets, new weathers, new languages.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He learns his new reality but he learns them too. Andromache, their constant in this world, the ancient daughter, goddess of war and life itself. His friend who will share her wine and bread, kick his ass from here to Kaukasus and back. All for his own good, obviously.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He learns his brothers too. Yusuf and Nicolò, Nicolò and Yusuf. He learns them together, for they are never apart, not at this point in time. They embrace each other in a way that first makes him turn his eyes away in silent outrage and unidentifiable shame, but with time as they grow more familiar to him he finds himself longing for. If Andromache is the constant of all of them in their quest of this earth, it does not devalue the constants the lovers find in each other.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And Sébastien. Well. He likes to think they learn him too, that he teaches himself to them while he learns the shape of his new normal. It takes no time and it takes immeasurable time, but he becomes a constant for them too. They learn how he likes his morning meal, they learn how his voice will go raspy after too many hours of drinking and smoking.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They learn him and they give him a family of four, with a new name and the sort of purpose he really did not think he could ever be important enough for. They also give him shit like not even his former brother in arms did. And Sébastien becomes Booker.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>(“How come you do not like passion fruits? Yusuf, he does not like passion fruits!”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Nicolò dearest, he is french, there has to be something wrong with him.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Stop chatting and start fighting, you idiots. Let him eat mud if he wants, we have a unit of angry Mongolians to stop!”)</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>But before that the world expands to every direction around him, it slides from under his feet and takes his loved ones with it. One by one, he loses his wife, his sons, his cousin and his neighbour and the baker who used to live on their street, the laughing girls that ran through the garden gate on their way to the market, everyone.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Time slides in his grasp twisting itself into a noose he can’t seem to be able to tighten around his own neck. And so he goes back to the three of them. Now he has more time to do anything and everything than he knows how to use. Before that the second lesson taught to him is one that will be there with him again and again, forcing him to learn it even after he thinks he has already learned all there is to learn.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He learns that his own will does not matter to things like time and the universe. It is the same lesson that he has always thought to be titled as “being immortal does not mean we stop hurting”, and really, lack of a will of his own is a violence too great for him to consider that those two are not the same.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>One of them is less true than the other, after all.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>ii</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It is easier to think in “the moments that dictate how life now is” than any number of years. Time has gone blurry, at least for now.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He misses his family. Of course he does. Andromache holds her hand out to him after he first foolishly wanted to believe a death died by his own hand would be different. It is not. He cries anyway, stupid and useless tears. He also pretends not to hear the low conversation Nicolò and Yusuf have after they think he has fallen asleep.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Hell, maybe he has. He does not sleep properly these days, and he doubts he will for a while. Not until the constant dreams of drowning and drowning and water entering his lungs and healing and drowning and salt and tears and screaming will stop.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They serve in a war. He has his lungs full of smoke and he feels his heart beating its way out of his chest as he runs from cower to cower. The dirt has made a crust of blackbrown on his skin, too little time and too little water for a proper cleaning, he sleeps in the filth of his and his victims’ blood. The dim light of an oil lantern paints yellow streaks to the ground, to the snow, to the mud, to the coarse woolen coat he has draped on the dirt floor to find what little comfort he can.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They serve in another war. He has his lungs full of smoke but this time it is artificial and tastes of poison, not the one from musket fire but much more sinister. He dies from a dose of a new chemical weapon, this death somewhat new and unique on his tongue with how strong and vicious the taste of it is even through pain. The dirt on his skin is a constant. The dim light from an oil lamp still burns, the flame flickering unchanged even as the container holding it evolves into new shapes with industrialization.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They serve in a war again.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They serve in another war again.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They serve.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They serve. He has his lungs full of smoke and he feels the blackbrown grime on his skin turn to dripping stickiness with body heat and sweat, with rain, with blood. He dies and dies. There are so many ways to die and he has not yet found all of them, but he thinks he is getting close. The feeling of napalm burning on his exposed skin is a wretched one. The feeling of Nico carving his skin off with the mixture of gel and petrol still burning him is even worse, but this way it takes less time for him to heal.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The war becomes a constant, paired with violence and natural disasters. Andy takes them to all of the conflicts with the sort of steel in her that Booker can’t ignore. He doubts anyone has ever been able to do that.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She laughs at the world harsh and bright and so savage, with teeth that he has seen rip apart a throat of a man. Her gravity pulls him in and repels him simultaneously, lighting him up inside out yet leaving him feeling cold and desolate every moment he has to come to terms with his life without her. The moments are long and short at the same time because a long time does not mean the same as it used to.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He thinks he grows to resemble her in a way, in the battle at the very least. Not the same one, never, but close enough to it for him to slot into his place on the team. He has heard Joe wax poetry of Nico being his moon (or was it the other way round, that Nicolò is the planet and Yusuf the tireless mirror shining light on it, following some invisible orbit of devotion?), and he has no trouble figuring out that Andromache is the sun of their tightly knit galaxy. What does that make of him, then? A distant planet barren of all life, or a distant comet, perhaps.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>(And then they serve in a war.)</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Nevertheless, he is a part of the night sky their team has constructed of violence. And he will help them obscure that sky from the greedy public with fire and smoke as he does his part, helping whoever Andy deems deserving of their blood spilled on the ground. He has his knives, his musket, his bayonet, his gun, his pistol, his grenade, his radio, his detonator, his computer, his fucking spoon, his bare hands if all else fails.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It takes time (ha) but one day he looks up from the lukewarm meal he shares with a Vietnamese guerrilla fighter to see a secret that should not be a secret, an understanding he barely can carry with his two hands. He keeps that secret folded neatly in his mind for the days that are too heavy. Or so he thinks, because it gets buried under rushing noise and dull desperation.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Then they serve in another war on another front in another unit if a different uniform in a different continent in a different year in a different fucking hole in the ground. And he thinks, too often, that he cannot do this again.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He cannot keep up with them, he is not simply good enough. He is not made to sustain eternity in the face of such pain and loss.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>How lovely and bitter, never sweet not this, that Booker does not get a say in it.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>iii</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Marrakesh is hot and loud. He hears the french spoken at the streets and cafes but it almost does not register as the dialect is way off. He traces the steps Yusuf takes as they blend in the endless stream of citizens, under the watchful eyes of Nicolò, tailing their true north as Andromache cuts through the crowds.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He hears a child call for her father and the sun flares in his eyes because he can’t suddenly breathe through blinding sadness. The longing ebbs in him, his steps stumble on the ground. Booker shakes his head and pulls through it like he has done for the last seventy years. Yusuf strides ahead and he follows, and he will not come back to this city if he can help it.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He has many places he will not go back, and some places he wishes he could return to but that do no longer exist.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>iv</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It goes like this: Sébastien dies. Booker heals.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It goes on for long enough that there really is nothing left of the son of his father, father of his sons. They do not tend to their wounds. He remembers when he was younger and fell from a stone wall next to the orchard. His mother’s hands cleaned and bandaged a cut that was deep enough to keep bleeding during the walk home. How the water had stung his skin as the grains of sand came free.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He had not meant to cry.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They do not tend to their wounds, there is no one to rinse sand and dirt from his wounds now but it does not matter. He jumps on a grenade and there is no rinsing the sand out of all the pieces of flesh strewn across the dusty desert. Healing will push the sand out of his body anyway, regenerate the organs he has lost too.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker cries even if he does not mean to, this time there are four hands instead of two, Nicky dragging him up and Joe trying to keep the parts of his body that are still present in one pile. Things are extremely blurry but Booker might make it to some half decent cover. They hold him between their bodies there as he shakes and throws up after his stomach regenerates enough to cramp.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Come on, Book”, Nicky speaks to him, holding his face between palms that feel wonderful on his skin.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Come back to us, little brother”, he continues and Booker tries so hard not to cry.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He still does. It hurts too much.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It has been a long time since any of them have tended to their wounds. But they rise up and walk.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>v</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>A glass of Madeira at Porto Santo. A bottle or two of Cocuy at Caracas under the humid sun of Venezuela. Plain old vodka, everywhere basically, but also in Moscow. Wine, so much wine. Champagne, when he can afford it and pretends he is celebrating instead of drowning.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Rum.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Whiskey.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Fucking sex on the beach and long island ice tea, margharitas and mojitos.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Beer, too, but the taste has grown almost boring on his tongue that longs for the aftertaste of alcohol. He dies of a methanol poisoning exactly four times, all of them because caring has become immeasurably tedious.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker is so past caring about this shit.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I’m so, so past caring bout this, sshit”, he slurs to Andy who is equally plastered yet still more dignified.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Unfair, really, how she gets to drink spirits like mineral water and be drunk and not have motor control problems and on top of that there are more things, he is sure. They are sitting on the balcony that overlooks the Bengal Gulf. Visakhapatnam surrounds them with the noise of a city that never sleeps, too many people in too small a place to ever fall silent and unmoving. He still prefers this over Calcutta but misses home again like he would miss all the limbs that have been removed from his person, if they did not keep growing back.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Me fucking too”, Andy notes and almost falls of her cushion while reaching for a new bottle.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker might have miscalculated the sobriety level of her, so what, knife him or something.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I fucking wanna die already”, he complains reasonably - well, actually whines - and Andy hits him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Get in the line pup, you are like, what? One hundred and some?” she snorts and almost chokes on the liquid she tries to drink.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker very carefully does not say the thing that he wants to. Apparently he still has some sort of a filter.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“One hundred and thirteen”, he mutters, almost succeeding in keeping the sulkiness from his face.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Pfft, yea that is what I thought.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do you really still think I’m a <em>fucking</em> baby”, he snaps because, apparently, he has no filter and will fold with the slightest provocation.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The silence after is why Booker should have a better filter: not because Andy can’t take whatever he drunkenly spits at her with his poisoned mind, but because of the way he slowly shrinks into himself with shame. There are days when he can almost believe he has grown to be better, changed from the man who deserted his unit and paid with his sins in the desolate snow of Russian winter. There are days, when he helps to bandage a wound on a scared civilian, carries a boy of seven to safety and sees the tears in the father’s eyes, when he helps put out a fire that threatens to consume all in its way.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Too bad there are days like this, when he tried his hardest and was still too little, too late, too human, yet not human enough. He does not look at Andy. The city around them is louder than ever, and he is not drunk enough if he can still feel this many different flavours of inadequate.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The problem, really, is that he is a baby compared to the rest of them. Andy has something like six millenia on him, Joe and Nicky just like, fuck, well longer than he has been alive. He is older than any of the people he will ever meet outside of the four of them yet he still is the youngest, the one who was last to open his eyes after his death, the one who has the least experience and the least amount of common memories. Fucking hell, maybe that is why he can never quite fit in with them, the place they have given him is the one of a child, and he has not been able to bear a simplicity like that in his distaste for any reminder of how family can hurt.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Sorry”, he finally slurs to her after fishing out and draining yet another bottle of chhaang.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He still can’t face her and the silence between them has grown too long for him to try to bridge it with anything else. He really is a desolate and unbecoming creature, too weak to do anything right or to make sense to himself or anyone else. Fuck.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The hand grabbing his shoulder and shaking him is not a kind one but it is very solid. It also surprises Booker into turning to look at Andy.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Book. I’m going to say this once and you better hear it right. You are ours. You are our little brother and you are our young one. You are a gift to us, a precious reminder of our past and something we hold on to and cherish. We protect you and we teach you, because we want you to be safe.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And he would really like to hear this, but it is hard to stomach what is in its essence an elaborate way to call him an infant incapable of looking after himself. For the fucking who knows so let’s say not the first time he is hurting down to his core and exhaustion clings to his bones, his unclear head stuck on a loop of “too tall for the kid’s table, not grown up enough to stand on the same stage as the only three people who matter to him these days”.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Andy shakes him again, there is her hand turning his chin up and back to look at her, inescapable as ever with fingers stronger than some tanks he has seen.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Snap out of it and just fucking listen to me”, she snarls in his face, “you are our beloved little brother but you are also our equal. We place our trust in you and let you guard our backs because you are one of us. We are not above you, Booker, or rather you are here with us. You are my brother first, my fucking protector the same as I’m yours.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She draws breath, and the glass bottle glints in the light as she tips her head back. Booker is -</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Fucking god damned hell of a <em>shitty fucking fuck</em>. He is, and he is breaking apart in one more way, one more time with the rough kindness of what Andy is offering to him. He would not look away now even if Andy let him, he would not turn from the sun this time. The bottle drips empty.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And with words like the sort of fire that does not care what it purges, with words like the sort of salvation that is offered to people who do not deserve it, with words even time itself will not erase. With words that Andromache uses like weapons on him she places a burden so dear it is a blessing on him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“And one day, after what I hope will be immeasurable time spent together with you, you will walk this earth after all of us are gone and be the oldest among our kind. Remember me, Sébastien. Please remember us, not the way you carry your blood family like a wound that will not heal. Remember us like a trophy, a fucking brand or a tattoo.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>vi</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He brands their blood on his hands and lives to tell the story.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He will never tell this story to a single soul if he can help it.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>vii</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He is so angry at first. Or not at first, at first he is genuinely terrified and hurt and so, so sorry for what he has done to them. But very soon he is angry, furious, hurt, wounded with their fucking arrogance and superiority. He trashes a hostel room at the outskirts of Paris and has to move. Then he trashes his rental, and leaves the mess as it is.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He is so angry. Angry because he has been this way for a long time now, perhaps he has always been this way. Wanting to die was a part of him, damn it, and now that his family has seen what an ugly thing that wish is to live with, they want nothing to do with him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The three of them had spent two hundred years by his side and loved him, accepted him, as he was. They had known his sorrow and desperation, his penance and cowardice, his desire for eternal sleep. They had sat down with him near the river and in the kitchen at night and by the fire in the desert. And they had heard him cry and curse his condition, and had wrapped him in coats and furs and blankets and told him they understood, that they still loved him, that they had felt the same.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And now that he has dyed his hands in a blood that is as red as the one he had spilled by their side, he is no longer welcome. Now that he has not only hoped for death but actually had the guts to try suicide in a way that meant something more, now they turn around to blame him for it.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It is both unfair and hollow. He hates himself for not knowing who to be without wanting to die. He hates them, a bit by bit, and hates himself for hating them, and then he hates himself again for wanting to be better and wanting to have been better. Mostly he hates himself for not having been better. The distinction there is minor, but important enough to drown him in cheap alcohol ten times over.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>By the time he has had his apartment for a week Booker has died from alcohol poisoning several times and from an overdose at least twice, and then there is that period of possibly weeks when he does not know what is up and what is down, what street he is puking on and who is the man touching him, or why he can’t seem to stop shaking even when his body is pumped full of chemicals.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It takes a bad sort of a scare, but after he dies out in a back alley of some eastern part of Paris and some unsuspecting civilian calls 112 on him, he tries to keep it together long enough to overdose only at his apartment. Thank, uh, god? So what and sue him, it is a phrase of speech, also fuck you, he has already healed enough to maintain a heartbeat by the time paramedics arrive, otherwise there would have been a hell of a mess to clean up.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Still, they take him to a hospital where he pukes and reeks all over the achingly bright room, the sterile surfaces now covered in filth. At least the staff is kind, the nurse who talks to him is matter of fact and steady to the point of emotionless. He straight up asks Booker to list all of the substances he has consumed and does not raise a brow as he mumbles out at least ten different kinds of illegal chemicals and some prescription medicines that he thinks he might have taken or not. His memory is spotty and it has the benefit of fitting the picture he is painting, oh and also it is true. It is very convenient too, because his fake persona only holds for a cursory check and that is all this world gives to the junkies and homeless.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The next twenty four hours or so, it is hard to keep up with passing hours only half conscious, still feel like five years or whatever. They stick him in behind a lock and a key for his own safety or something. The room is very empty but there is a mattress that smells of disinfectant and that one disgusting chemical cleaner that reminds him of rotting lemons. The mattress is there to hold his weight and he is hidden away from all censure, and the place feels safe in its anonymity.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker is alone now, and slowly he tries to come to terms with the fact that this is the best the things can be now.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>viii</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It takes him embarrassingly long time to notice that Quynh is batshit insane and dragging him off the rails along with her. In his defense it has to be said that he is not exactly doing very hot at that point either, but he really should have known better. There is proof enough of what kind of a man he is and what sort of things do happen to him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>But as it is, it takes him two weeks to get remotely sober, then he has a meltdown after he falls asleep one night without alcohol or pills and doesn’t see the usual dreams. It should have been a relief. He should have been happy to wake up from natural sleep, without the constant mild headache or the clinging terror of drowning with seawater. Instead he comes awake slowly, with heavy and stretchy restfulness lingering in his body, and promptly panics.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The lack of discomfort is so foreign he can’t take it. He proceeds to crash his way to the bathroom to throw up, shakes and shakes on the cheap linoleum floor. He’d really rather not think about anything at all but his brain has not been obedient in that way in, well, ever. The lack of a drowning woman screaming in anger and agony feels like having to part with his lungs.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Actually, scratch that. It doesn’t feel like any of the deaths he has died, but more like the life he had lived from the moment he lost his wife to the death of his youngest son. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker had then done the same thing as after that particular family fun time: gotten so drunk he went nearly blind with it. He does not even know if he meant it to be just one more time before he crawls out of the bottle to cling to his new (old, in all ways but this one) partner. But well, alcohol and him, they are lovers at this point, or possibly mortal enemies. Inseparable, symbiotic, cancerous.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The next month goes by in a constant state of inebriation mixed with occasional hung overs. Quynh doesn’t care, and that should have been a sign for him that she was not as interested in his general well being as she had claimed. The only time she remarks on his state is when she needs him to do something for her and he is too wasted to comprehend any of the languages she snarls in his face.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She manually reboots his system by snapping his neck and puts him to work after he comes to. It almost reminds him of Andy. Maybe that is why he can’t recognize the violence Quynh directs at the world in general, not until he is staring at Nile’s face from his laptop screen and trying to explain to Quynh that Nile was definitely not the sort of weak link that they should kidnap and torture as a bait for Andy.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It has been close to three months then, of him and Quynh, still not even one full year of his exile done. He does not contact them directly, that would be a violation of their terms and if there is any corner of his miserable soul that can earn their forgiveness then he will die and live and die again and go mad with loneliness and grief, but he will not break his word to them again. What bleak pleasure he finds in the irony of this he takes, because at this point Sébastien le Livre is a professional betrayer. So that is what he does, he just chooses his target to be Quynh.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He’d like to think he stops Quynh’s plan because he is a good person. He is not, and that is something he keeps paying for in broken hearts and cold eyes of the people he has loved. He still stops Quynh, because it is the right thing to do. It is a good thing to do.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Bad persons can still sometimes do good things, or so he has to believe, or he has to turn back and never be better again, to abandon all but isolation and hurting others.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>ix</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>After that particular disaster had been mitigated to a degree they dig his dismembered body out of the outskirts of Brazil, Brazil. Oh, Quynh had not taken kindly to his betrayal.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He comes to in Andy’s arms, in pain and delirious from what has been the last four days. At first he is not sure what is going on and where he is, what year it is. Fuck, he is not sure who he is at this point. But he knows the bruising grip that holds him, knows the touch on his skin and the breath in his ear. He knows the voices too, and with those he recognizes the body behind his back holding him up, and thinks he has lost his fucking mind for real this time, because Yusuf would not hold him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Maybe he says some words too, but mostly he just tries not to scream. Kind of weird, really, because just half an hour ago he had tried to scream and been choked by the suffocating dirt. The cocktail of emotions sloshing in his body threatens to drown him, and then it is all too much, and he has his arms now so he can fight, he can struggle and push and hit and fucking <em>move</em>. He thinks he might scream then. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker loses some of the minutes after that, but then he is vomiting dirt in the dirt and there are no hands touching him. That is even worse, in a way, being alone again and not knowing if he actually saw and heard what he had hoped to, so he might sob out a pitiful moan, curling in on himself, over the mess on the ground and the still gruesome gaps in his abdomen where there were some pieces still missing.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>If he could, he would freeze time then and there. To stay forever in this moment when he is afraid, yet not devastated. Dreading for what is coming, but not yet torn apart. He is not sure what it is that he is afraid of the most, that they are gone or that they are still with him. He just knows he is afraid, and like the coward he is he cannot look up or hear them call his name.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Yet once more, there is no choice for him to make, causality rips it out of his hands for him. He had thought long ago that he had learned what it meant to understand that his freedom of will had been taken from him for good. What a laughable, arrogant thing to assume. He had not learned anything then, he had not even thought about how much more being allowed something despite himself hurt than being denied.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker knows how Nicky’s voice sounds like when he prays. He has heard it twice exactly and he hears the same tone now, but he does not speak Latin. He looks like salvation anyway, when Booker’s head snaps up to stare at him, kneeling there in the yellow, dry grass. Nicolò di Genova looks both like the only mercy he has ever craved for and so, so scared.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Please, Book, dearest one, please”, he says and.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Sébastien does not care. He is lost, so lost, has always been but not like this, and there is no holding back when he lunges for Nicky, grabs onto him with both arms and buries his face in that familiar shoulder. Cries. And despite everything or because of it, Nicky holds on.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>After, there are arrangements.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The rest of the team has never gone far, not surprisingly since there are no other sources of entertainment. When Booker manages to pull himself together at least marginally and stops sobbing, he is reminded that he and Nicky are now both covered in blood, soil, vomit, and apparently piss. Delightful. He has some fabric on him, formerly clothing, but dismemberment tends to be bad for all sorts of outfits, and so the scraps still clinging to him are more of a suggestion than actually covering his body.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And that is when he suddenly comes aware that the rest of them are all standing around him, Andy, Joe, Nile, fucking Quynh, in a circle with their backs turned to him and Nicky. Like they were protecting him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Oh there you are, Basti. Come home with us now”, Nicky says with warmth in his voice like the sunrise.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He goes. The safehouse they have set up this time is not a small one but it is not a large one either, meaning that there is a room for eating and cooking, and two rooms for sleeping. There is also shower, thankfully. Andy takes him there, stripping herself down to a tank top and boxer shorts before just dumping him in the empty bathtub.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Water rains down on him, he has yet to stop shaking, the smell of his filth is enough to kill a minor god. But Andy is there, stripping him from that ragged fabric, rinsing away gore, soaping up his arms, washing his hair. Tilting his head this way and that, silent but direct. She washes all of him, not hesitating once, and really he does not have the energy to be shy. She has seen him before, touched him too. This time the touch of her hands is a marvel that traces the outlines of his soul too.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She towels him off and walks him out of the bathroom to the communal space where Nile and Joe are taking care of their gear. For a split second he is left to wonder what on earth are they going to do with him now, water from his hair dripping tiny droplets on the dusty carpet and wearing only a huge, surprisingly fluffy towel that Andy had wrapped around him.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“He will sleep with us tonight”, Joe says then, and Booker makes a noise of confused protest, because surely this is too much.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>But Andy nods, and Nile does not even raise her brow, and he thinks it is time to trust their judgement over his own. So, again, he goes.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Nicky is in the bedroom already, stripped of his combat gear and looking at them with the sort of care that Booker only associates with Joe. It does not waver. Instead Nicky rises up and offers Booker the t-shirt and pair of boxers he thinks he has seen on Joe. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They do not make a rookie mistake like curling together to sleep and leaving Booker on the other side of the bed. No, they are too good for that and crowd him in the middle of their bed, touching him with gentleness that they usually reserve for each other only. It should make him feel included.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It should maybe feel like the nights they have spent in various tents across the globe, or in the tiniest safehouse in Lappeenranta, it should feel like the times they have invited him to their bed to share pleasure if not love. (That had been a surprise to him, at first, but immortality screwed with perspective in a way, or perhaps made them see clearer past the norms of what the current society considered proper.) First and foremost, it should help.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It does not help. They hold him through the night and he aches and aches, loves them and is loved but not in the way that he can tolerate. He sleeps, then, and wakes up gasping with terror, the taste of saltwater on his lips replaced with sand, dirt, earth. They wake with him, Nicolò already lifting the covers from his body so he can move, Yusuf a solid warmth in front of him as he sobs into that muscled chest.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Maybe it helps a little. He drifts to sleep again, almost too exhausted to drink the glass of water Nicolò helps to raise to his lips. The next time he gasps his way back from the dream they wake with him again, or possibly they have not slept at all. There is a warm cup of chiya and a piece of toast for him, and he is almost sure that he recognizes the pattern that is happening from years ago.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>This time there is also a packet of melatonin. Booker would laugh, maybe, if he were a little more present, a little less hollow. Instead he takes four times the recommended dose and does not dare face the eyes of his brothers.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>x</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>When they had woken up on that train, Andy had been so tangled in her personal frustration that she had not noticed what Booker was up to. Because no, he had not anticipated Nile, and so he had slipped, almost showing his true colours with his desperation to get them to hunt after Copley.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Nile had come to their lives at the perfect time. At the worst time, of course, but it was still the perfect time. There hadn’t been a new one in two hundred years, Andy had raged at the time. And that night when Booker had been drifting in and out of sleep, after trying to find the level of drunk that would mean no dreams but not cause a fight with Joe and Nicky, he had thought about what Andy had said.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He had thought about how the two hundred years between two new immortals had set Andy’s teeth in a grimace, and wondered how it must have been when they had first dreamed about him, so so long after Nicolò and Yusuf. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>When he wakes up this time he is alone, but the door is ajar and he can hear a familiar sort of conversation drift to him. This time it is in English, for Nile’s benefit no doubt, though there are few sentences here and there in Arabic, Italian, Vietnamese, Greek. He is too tired to move at first, his immortal body healed and ready to go but some deeper exhaustion pinning him down to the mattress.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Booker lets the morning and the conversation drift around him. Moments tangle with the bedsheets, twisting as he shifts from one distant headspace to the next. They are talking about him, his punishment, and he listens with the sort of peace that only comes from clarity through pain.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He had thought he knew what the punishment was about. He had thought he understood it, loud and clear.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>You thought you were so alone with us that you betrayed us, well now you see what real loneliness is all about.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I don’t think I’m ready”, he says.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>A strange sort of silence fills the room, as his team turns as one to look at him in the doorway.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I don’t think I’m ready to come back. I have not paid the price for what I did, and I want to do that even more than I want to come back to you”, he repeats, because he thinks he has finally found some of the words that he wants to say.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“But Book”, Nile begins and then trails off.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I have to pay to be free of my own guilt. I have to absolve to be able to live with what I have done. You have named the price so I will pay it.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The first thing he has learned is that the world is more than he had ever thought was possible. It is a lesson he still keeps learning. It goes well with the lesson he is only beginning to understand now.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This fic contains violence, suicidal idealization, heavily internalized self worth issues, substance abuse, descriptions of war, several suicide attempts, panic attacks, plenty of emotional distress and crying, and generally heavy themes of betrayal and loneliness. There are also mentions of other potentially triggering events and themes, such as homophobia, implied sexual offense, civilian casualties, mentions of torture, kidnapping plans, neglect.</p><p>The most graphic moments are descriptions about chemical weapons, overdosing, and finally digging a dismembered and buried alive Booker up, and dealing with the fallout.</p><p>Any and all deaths of the guard are temporary, any sexual or romantic content between them is strictly consensual. Generally they mean well to each other, barring the exception of Quynh who is a bit of a mystery here but not irredeemable.</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>